Myths that Everyone Just Seems to Believe

there are certain things that everybody just knows 1+ 1 equals 2 snow is cold and never feed a mar after midnight however for every genuine fact that is part of the public Consciousness there seems to be at least one myth that has become universally recognized as truth sometimes it's because the things make intuitive sense sometimes it's because they seem too cool or bizarre to be made up and sometimes it's just because it's something that people want to be true despite not having any basis in reality today we're going to be looking at four of these myths that everyone just seems to believe to be [Music] [Music] true it's been a popular Trope science fiction for several decades now and something everybody has heard before humans only use 10% of our brains and the rest is filled with apparently Kurds and way only by becoming vegan can a person realize their brain's true potential unlock a whole host of superpowers okay that particular satirical version of this myth may be an overly specific reference to Scot po rest of the world but the general belief still stands people believe that we only use 10% of our brains and accessing the rest would give us superhuman intelligence and even maybe psychic powers a survey conducted in 2013 showed that 65% of Americans still believe this long debunked myth so how did it become so popular in the first place it's likely that it began in the early 1900s thanks to to people misunderstanding the research of Harvard psychologists William James and Boris cidus James claimed that most people only met a fraction of their mental potential using child prodigies as an example of what humans could all be capable of he went on to say most of us feel as if we lived habitually with some sort of cloud Weighing on us below our highest Notch of clearness in discernment sureness in reasoning or firmness in deciding compared with what we ought to be we are only half awake our far as dampened our drafts are checked we are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources aside from not including a specific numerical claim James was talking about how people felt rather than how our brains actually functioned James's argument was that things like social decorum and falling into a routine hampered people making them listless and ineffective compared to what they could accomplish this was basically a claim about drive and motivation rather than brain chemistry but the self-help industry was quick to latch on to these UNS specific claims and turn them into something a bit more marketable this first rose to prominence in the forward to the 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People stating that James had made the specific 10% claim that wasn't factually accurate but this shouldn't really come as surprise to anyone familiar with the self-help genre it gave crooked gurus something they could point to from a Harvard psychologist that showed there was the possibility that they could become so much more they could transcend the rest of humanity and become better people by unlocking their brains full potential and of course by pay the self-help gurus a substantial fee to facilitate that process but this myth spread like wildfire because it's the sort of thing people wanted to be true if it was true then maybe there really were people with psychic telepathic and telekinetic abilities and maybe with a little work they could become one of those people as well it certainly helped that fiction stories were happy to incorporate this Theory as it provided them with yet another simple short hand for establishing a setting a deer wandering through city streets means the city has been long abandoned due to an apocalyptic event a rusty swing set moving without anyone in the seat means that ghosts are real and a narrator or a character saying that humans only use 10% of their brains means that the story is going to be full of magic powers but that's okay because it's rooted in pseudo science of course there is absolutely no truth to this myth it has been disproven countless times by things like MRIs that show that even while sleeping all parts of the brain have at least some level of activity even without advanced neural imaging technology it should have been pretty obvious from the start that this wasn't true if humans only used 10% of our brains that would mean that most brain injuries would be inconsequential as the damaged portion wasn't actually doing anything in the first place in actuality even minor damage to any portion of the brain can have massive consequences this also oh would have been pointless from an evolutionary standpoint brains consume a a lot of energy which increases the food requirements to survive and function requiring all those extra resources for no added benefit would have been a massive competitive disadvantage allowing other species of humans the chance to become the dominant species instead of us look while this myth is a fun plot device and many people really want to believe it's true because of all the implications that it would have it just has no basis in reality much of this is blamed on television shows like CSI for giving people a false idea of how forensic evidence works on television police are always able to find the perfect complete fingerprints which they're able to definitively match to another person and the word match is key as it's the sort of thing that potential jurors expect to hear however in the real world forensic evidence rarely results in a 100% probability of anything fingerprints ballistics even DNA a are usually determined to be consistent with a suspect or an object but rarely guaranteed the samples are normally incomplete in some way such as partial fingerprints or DNA samples that have degraded over time even with a perfect DNA sample only a handle of specific markers are tested rather than comparing the entire sequence the odds that the sample could have come from somebody else may be one in several billion but seeing as there are several billion people in the world that doesn't rule it out with absolute certainty obviously in in the case where the odds are that low it is extremely strong evidence but not all DNA can produce these results only an undamaged sample of nuclear DNA can give that level of assurance but often times either the sample is damaged or it's only mitochondrial DNA now mitochondrial DNA you see is received only from the mother rather than being a mix of DNA from both parents so there is much less variation in this DNA two people who share a single common ancestor centuries ago can have the same mitochondrial DNA making it much less conclusive than nuclear DNA but let's say that or we take it at face value that CSI is right and everything is a perfect match fingerprints and DNA were found at a crime scene and forensics is claiming with 100% certainty that they belong to a specific subject even if that were the case it wouldn't necessarily be definitive proof of anything forensic evidence is all circumstantial of course that ties into another popular myth that circumstantial evidence is weak unreliable or even inadmissible in practice most evidence used in court is circumstantial rather than direct evidence other than an eyewitness account videos or photographs of the crime taking place pretty much everything else is circumstantial evidence now some of it such as forensics can be considered incredibly strong evidence but it doesn't tell the whole story and so inferences need to be made fingerprints and DNA may prove that a person was at the scene of a crime but what exactly does that tell us when were they there how long were they were they there for what were they doing forensics alone can't answer these questions and often times there are simple non-criminal answers now obviously we're not suggesting that forensics is some sort of B pseudo science that shouldn't be allowed in courtrooms you know like polygraphs forensics pretty great however despite the popular myth that forensics are the be all and end all when it comes to evidence their reality is much more nuanced than most people realize [Music] [Applause] [Music] imagine you're a student taking a high school physics class you've been learning the basics of mechanic such as force and acceleration and the teacher decides to single you out for a demonstration the teacher stands beside your desk holding a bowling ball above your head and poses a simple question that your hope is purely hypothetical would you rather have me drop this bowling ball on your head from here or have me drop a penny on your head from the top the Empire State Building as scary as the bowling ball may seem the reason that surely a penny would be worse acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s squared So based on the height of the building it would be falling at over 200 mph that sounds like it would cause a lot of damage and if that's actually what happens well yeah it might however the bowling ball drop from directly above your head would be far more dangerous this is because every object falling through air rather than a vacuum has a terminal velocity as an object falls due to the force of gravity it experiences a force of drag in the opposite direction the faster the object falls the more air it passes through causing the force of drag to increase eventually the drag Force becomes equal to the force of gravity at which point the object has reached its terminal velocity it simply cannot fall any faster than it's already falling two main things affect the dominal velocity of an object its mass and the surface area the larger the surface area the more air pushes against the object as it falls thus creating more drag and the force of gravity on an object on earth anyway is 9.8 m a squared times its mass so the more massive an object the more drag is required for it to hit terminal velocity the penny happens to have an extremely low mass just 2.5 g and a rather high surface area relative to its mass sometimes anyway theoretically the penny could be spinning falling flat or even falling straight down with its Edge facing the ground rather than one of its sides realistically though the penny would be spinning so its terminal velocity would be about 30 to mph but theoretically could reach a size 75 compare that with a bullet that probably has two to three times as much mass and would be traveling at well over a th000 m hour and suddenly the Penny doesn't seem so bad in comparison this was actually even tested in an episode of Mythbusters and it was so simple that it only took about 3 minutes to disprove The MythBusters built a machine to fire a penny at 65 mph and then tested the results though it was enough to chip asphalt there wasn't nearly enough Force to embed the penny in concrete destroy a car kill a person or any of the other variations of this story one of the MythBusters even had the penny fired directly into his hand and it didn't cause any injury it just kind of stung a little bit even if Earth had no atmosphere and the penny was able to fall without any sort of drag the 200 mph it would reach still wouldn't be enough to kill a person it would be unpleasant and it could potentially crack a bone but it wouldn't be lethal that all said it is still rude and illegal to throw pennies or other objects off of skyscrapers so don't do [Music] it nobody likes being sick you can probably even remember how miserable you felt the last time you got a cold a stuffy nose inflammation sore throat and fever among potential other symptoms these are the symptoms of rhino viruses the most common cause of the common cold and it's best to use medication to combat these symptoms that has been the common belief for as long as medications have existed particular anti partic or fever reducing medications however while all of those symptoms are the result of viral infection the virus doesn't actually cause any of them all it wants to do is get into your upper respiratory tract and enter a healthy cell that it can reprogram using its RNA so the cell will produce more of the virus once enough has been produced the viruses will break out of the cell so that they can infect some other cells and do the same creating enough so that they will be expelled and infect a new host but those symptoms you associate with the common cold aren't being caused by the virus as most cold viruses Target epithelial cells rather than respiratory tissue all of those symptoms are actually your immune system's response to the virus and it is specifically designed to kill the virus this includes those mild fevers the people have long been keen on reducing for a long time reducing those fevers was viewed as the best course of action when your body's temperature increases so does your metabolism meaning you burn more calories it can also result in sweating and dehydration it is extremely important to replace the calories and fluids being lost reducing the fever not only provided comfort for the sick individual so they felt a little better it also prevented this increased metabolic cost yet new research shows that this may actually be a bad idea for most fevers as uncomfortable as the symptoms may be they exist for a reason using the medication to fight those symptoms may make you feel better so you can function throughout your day rather than remaining bedridden but it's also hindering your body's ability to battle the infection not only can that result in a longer duration for the illness but it may increase the transmission rate of course this varies greatly depending on the specific virus and how it is transmitted to another person while the idea that fevers should always be reduced is now largely seen as a myth it was at least based on what was once vied as best practices after all if medicine to treat symptoms of an illness makes the patient feel better then obviously it must have been a good thing like medicinal heroin and cocaine however this practice was also partly based in fear thanks to two related myths those myths are that a fever will continue rising and less treated and that if a patient's temperature reaches 105° they can start to suffer brain damage fortunately it turns out that your brain actually knows what it's doing and will very rarely raise your temperature above 103 or 104° even if you have an extremely high temperature of 105 or 106 this still isn't enough to cause brain damage that doesn't occur until the body temperature reaches 107.6 de which generally can't happen from a fever alone of course everything we've discussed here has been related to mild fevers all of the best available current research possess that when it comes to mild fevers it's better to Simply let it ride and let your body be sick rather than try and treat it this is not always the case and if you have a high fever like 105 then taking anti partic may be a good idea but if your fever is actually that high then you should probably just call your doctor and do whatever they say rather than listening to us n [Music]

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 335,968

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects, sideprojects, myths that are true, myths people believe in, common myths that are true, common myths people believe in, myths, true myths, common myths

Id: vAm7k50fCzI

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2024